Overexposure to worry
My two older children have started taking public transit to school. High school and an early seventh-grade math class have upset our historic routine of all piling into the car together for one big school drop off. And so, around 7 a.m. I walk them to the bus stop with our dog, and away they go. But, of course, that doesn't mean I stop watching them.
As soon as I get back into the house, I open "Life360" and track their commute. It's our new family app that tells me where my kids are, how fast they're going, and ... come to find out ... every unsettling incident that's happened nearby in the past twenty-four hours. The map is littered with little exclamation points, each indicating a traffic accident, an act of violence, or police activity.
One of the challenges of the modern world is overexposure to information and news. In previous generations, we consumed headlines through habit and ritual. Most people would read the paper in the morning and watch the news at night. Our exposure was limited by time and space. But now, we consume information all the time and everywhere. And this overexposure is having a devastating effect on our souls and how we see others.
Just a few years ago, I would've dropped my kids off at the bus stop and not seen them until the bus brought them home at the end of the day. During that time, I wouldn't have known about the countless other details and events surrounding their commute. Nor would I have worried about them. You see, unexpectedly, more information has made me more anxious.
Researchers have identified what they call "media saturation overload" and "headline stress disorder." These modern phenomena explain the anxiety and languishing we feel knowing about all the problems in the world. As I write this, on the New York Timeshomepage alone there are reports about Gloria Steinem's death, the renaming of a great lake, Lindsay Clancy's trial, the war in Ukraine, the war in the Middle East, and new regulations that threaten some schools' tax exemption status. In a few hours, most of those headlines will be updated or replaced with something new.
What's good about this information is that it helps us see beyond ourselves and our immediate context. What's troubling and even harmful though is that this saturation leads to a spiritual callousness. We scroll effortlessly through death, narcissistic power plays, mass murder, and devastating consequences to eduction. Routinely, we log off with a small sense of being informed and a deep sense of hopelessness.
When we open the Scripture the reason and remedy for our anxiousness becomes clear. Psalm 121:8 says, "The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore." Perhaps this is why I feel so hopeless after reading the news. Maybe this is why I'm so nervous watching my kids go to school. I forget someone else is watching. God is watching the world. God is watching my children. God is watching me. The psalmist said earlier that "he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep" (v.4). In other words, God is always watching and working for the good.
I don't think this means we have to delete our tracking apps and stop reading the news. Nor does it mean that nothing bad will ever happen. But I do think it's a good reminder that God isn’t distant and disengaged from my life and so I don’t have to carry what only he can. Our overexposure to the world's chaos isn't a problem to solve with better filters. It's an invitation to daily trust the Lord with our own souls, the people we love, the routes they travel, and the headlines that will be replaced by tomorrow morning.
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Written by Jason C. Helveston, Elder for Teaching and Vision
The Hebrew word for "keep" (shamar) in Psalm 121:8 means to watch, guard, or preserve. When the psalmist says the Lord will keep our "going out and coming in," he is using a Hebrew merism—a figure of speech that names two extremes to include everything between them. Every movement, every commute, every ordinary Tuesday is covered by this promise.
Psalm 121:4 says God "neither slumbers nor sleeps." In a world of push notifications and twenty-four-hour news cycles, this is not a description of divine surveillance but of divine attentiveness. Human watchers grow tired; our devices need charging; the Lord does not.
The phrase "worry is a prayer in the wrong direction" circulates widely in Christian devotional writing without a clear original attribution. It captures the theological reality that anxiety is a misdirected form of the trust God invites us to place in him.
The concepts of "media saturation overload" and "headline stress disorder" are discussed in C. D. Huff, "Media overload is hurting our mental health," APA Monitor on Psychology, November 2022.
For more on how constant news exposure affects mental health, see C. D. Huff, "Media overload is hurting our mental health," APA Monitor on Psychology, November 2022. Available at https://www.apa.org/monitor/2022/11/strain-media-overload
On the phenomenon of news fatigue and "mean world syndrome," see "News fatigue: what it is and how to avoid it," The Well, UNC-Chapel Hill, September 16, 2022. Available at https://www.unc.edu/discover/news-fatigue-what-it-is-and-how-to-avoid-it/
